Posted on 09/27/2010 12:05:57 PM PDT by goldendays
"China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths .. Japan has been the main buyer of Chinese rare earths for many years, using them for a wide range of industrial purposes, like making glass for solar panels.
They are also used in small steering control motors in conventional gasoline-powered cars as well as in motors that help propel hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius.
American companies now rely mostly on Japan for magnets and other components using rare earth elements, as the United States’ manufacturing capacity in the industry became uncompetitive and mostly closed over the last two decades. "
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The blind leading the blind into the ditch. China is not our friend.
Prius , smeeeus, we can get along fine w/o hybrid.
There's a Volvo on record closing in on 3 million miles!
That said, I think we have almost infinite mileage capacity in our existing fleet.
HE ASSOCIATED PRESS September 27, 2010, 1:08PM ET text size: TT
GE enters venture to make wind turbines in China
DETROIT
General Electric Co. said Monday it will team with Harbin Electric Machinery Co. to make electricity-generating wind turbines for Chinese customers.
The deal will help GE compete in China’s $13 billion wind-generated power market, which is the world’s largest and is expected to grow 500 percent by 2020, GE said in a statement.
China’s electricity demand is growing at 12 percent a year, and the government is supporting renewable energy policies, GE’s statement said. The support played an important role in GE’s decision to invest in the joint venture, it said.
GE will own 49 percent of the venture, while Harbin Electric Machinery will hold 51 percent. The new venture will make GE-designed wind turbines for near shore and offshore use in China, the statement said. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Harbin Electric Machinery is a subsidiary of Harbin Power Equipment Co. The companies have been partners since 2004 on gas turbines in China. Harbin Electric was the first power equipment company in China in 1949, the statement said.
Shares of GE fell 16 cents, or 1 percent, to $16.50 in midday trading.
Yet another secret thing about environmental activists that the media will never tell Americans: they have prevented or put out of business hundreds of U.S. mines that would have produced a wealth of rare earth minerals. Yet another thing for which we are dependent upon foreigners, for NO OTHER REASON than environmentalists have forced us to be.
But Obama is China's friend. The rumor is that the Chinese will seek to purchase a very large stake in the revamped GM when it goes public, at bargain basement prices, sometime after the November elections.
Balderdash. The Left has been spouting the statistic that the UNITED STATES consumes an unfair percentage of the world's resources. The educrats are not going to like this "change" in scripts.
when the chinese copy ge tech they’ll shunt ge aside.
(china own 51% of all company doing business in china territory, )
General Electric Co. (GE) announced a joint venture with a subsidiary of Harbin Power Equipment Co. (1133.HK) to manufacture and supply wind turbines to its customers in China, as the industrial conglomerate looks to extend its reach in the nation’s $13 billion wind industry.
China, already the world’s largest wind turbine sales territory, is projected to see demand in that segment surge as the nation’s installed wind capacity is predicted to jump from last year’s level of 25 gigawatts to 150 gigawatts by 2020.
“This is an important investment in China for GE and one that will enable us to participate in the tremendous growth potential of the Chinese wind turbine segment,” said Jack Wen, president and chief executive of GE Energy China. GE has been active in China’s energy sector for nearly a century, supplying the country with 935 wind turbines.
The new company will manufacture GE-designed wind turbines for near-shore and offshore applications in China. Near-shore wind turbines are classified as wind turbines installed on land within three kilometers of the nearest shoreline, or lying on the water within 10 kilometers of the shore.
Under the joint venture, Harbin’s electric machinery division will own 51% of the company, with GE owning the rest. Meanwhile, Harbin will purchase a 49% interest in an existing GE Shenyang Wind factory, which will continue to manufacture land-based wind turbines.
China has said it wants renewable energy like wind to meet a higher percentage of its energy needs in the future, as it seeks to rein in emissions that have made its cities among the smoggiest on Earth. But experts have said the country’s transmission network currently can’t absorb the rate of growth in renewable-energy output.
GE’s announcement comes just days after Chief Executive Jeff Immelt warned that the lack of a comprehensive U.S. energy policy and its “stupid” current structure are causing America to fall behind in new energy fields. In sharply worded comments at an energy event in Washington, he praised China’s approach to energy and criticized what he called a stalled effort to revamp U.S. energy policy.
Immelt went on to say China is moving faster to develop clean technologies such as nuclear power, electric vehicles and wind power. He also said China has the right mix of a big local market, innovation in technology, a low-cost supply chain and government policy support. China’s State Grid utility, he said, is larger than nearly all U.S. utilities combined.
Well if everyone had it then it would not be called RARE,
maybe just normal earth magnets.
Does not have the same allure to it, does it?/S
“The blind leading the blind into the ditch. China is not our friend.”
You just don’t understand FRiend. Doesn’t matter if China is our friend or not. Doesn’t matter if we screw American workers to move factories to China. Doesn’t matter if our security is compromised by allowing China to be the sole supplier of critical goods.
What matters is that a business will make more money in China because they can pollute without restriction, not worry about worker safety at all, and pay 30 cents an hour.
Bottom line is the bottom line.
(Ok, so the national security thing can be an issue, and wrecking the world’s largest consumer market has been problematic. And trying to recover from a recession with a much reduced manufacturing base is kind of tough. Product quality can be horrible at times. But none of that matters... trust me. It’s a global market).
well you gotta figure china indirectly helps finance groups that oppose this type of mining. My view on environmental groups in general is follow the money to the nation-states who benefit from their efforts in so many sectors.
There are some problems ~ some of them are simply the metalic residue of the radioactive decay of the element thorium. Some of them are found with thorium (which is still radioactive). Others are tightly bound in electrochemical bonds with other stuff.
They use both magnetic and gravity processes to separate rare-earths from ore.
So, anyway, the stuff is everywhere, it's cheap as dirt (it is dirt), and it's DIFFICULT to extract ~ either due to the chemistry involved or the radioactivity!
Plans are afoot to use the rare-earth extraction process debris in thorium reactors.
The Chinese are cutting back on production because of the radioactivity ~ time to clean it up and start over.
They'll probably be off-line for a decade or so. In the meantime we have cleaned up a mine in the US and it will reopen in 2011. There are others out there in various stages of preparation.
I see many of my fellow Freepers lining up for these rare-earth mining ventures, right?!? Hey, guys ~ jus' a little radioactivity among friends ~ ain't no thang!
Well, it wasn’t 3 million miles like on a Volvo, but my father got 350,000 on a Falcon 30 years ago. He had two Falcons and 3 engines. He would tinker with one engine, cleaning valves and cylinders, then after 50,000 miles put it in one of the cars. Kept rotating them. The running board and other lower parts finally rusted off thanks to road salt (New Jersey). The Cubans don’t have a problem with road salt. ;-)
ept. 27 (Bloomberg) — General Electric Co., the world’s second-biggest maker of wind turbines, formed a joint venture with China’s Harbin Power Equipment Co. to make and supply equipment in the world’s biggest market.
GE, whose power-generation equipment supplies a third of the world’s electricity, sees the $13 billion wind market expanding sixfold to 150 gigawatts by 2020, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company said in a statement today. The venture is with Harbin Power’s subsidiary, Harbin Electric Machinery Co.
GE Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt is expanding partnerships in China in areas that include aviation, health care and energy. He’s pointed to the country as one with a consistent energy policy that allows for rapid clean energy development. The wind venture will make equipment for projects including offshore developments using direct-drive, or gearless, technology, a market GE has also targeted in Europe.
The venture announced today expands Harbin’s relationship with GE. Harbin has teamed with the U.S. company to provide heavy-duty gas turbines since 2004, Gong Jing Kun, chairman of Harbin Electric, said in the statement.
The Chinese are not throwing in the towel on this but they are pulling back. I suspect it's the radioactivity part. They didn't pay any attention to it anywhere ~ which is one of the reasons you get radioactive plasterboard in American homes!
good post
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2a7gh_lou-dobbs-china-manufacture-in-mexi_news
Lou Dobbs China Manufacture in Mexico NAFTA pay no taxes
By then we will be sending our tax checks directly to Beijing.
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